A discussion of interesting books from my current stock A WordPress.com site

My last post discussed wounds and surgeons in the first volume of Roger Boyle’s romance Parthenissa (1651), in which I argued that the hero’s body was being medicalised in a distinctively modern way. But there’s plenty more to say about the function of wounds in this romance. The hero’s body in Parthenissa is not just a patient’s, submitting to the ‘plaisters’ of the surgeon; the hero is also an active desiring subject who has been overcome with physical passion for the heroine.

So far, so conventional; the wound representing love stretches all the way back to Cupid’s arrow. However, clichés become clichés for a good reason; just because the wound is now hackneyed as a metaphorical construction of passion it shouldn’t blind us to its effectiveness. The wound conveys a loss of control, the absolute physicality of the body confronted with the object of desire. What emerges from a reading…